The thing about blogging is that the longer I leave it between writing posts, the likelihood of next ones being written seems to diminish rapidly. This is not good! It certainly isn’t for a lack of content (final projects during the last two weeks of Makers provide plenty of that), but putting the metaphorical pen to paper seems to happen all too rarely.

So let me remind myself why I started blogging (and why I need to continue!)

  1. To develop my communication and writing skills. Communicating fairly complex ideas and experiences in a way that is readable by individuals from various backgrounds and levels of industry-specific knowledge is a critical skill for software developers. Through writing those ideas in an understandable format, I hope to ensure that I have fully grasped certain concepts.

  2. To document interesting or particularly difficult things that I have learnt. I have just started reading a book about algorithms, and I anticipate that forming the subject of my next blog post.

  3. To help others. I have benefitted enormously from the good citizens of the tech industry, always finding a helpful blog post when I’m stuck. So I aim to have some utilitarian function to my posts as well.

Enrique spoke to us a couple of weeks ago about freelancing as a developer and general life advice. He said two things in particular which struck a chord with me - and which I admire greatly. Ideally he dedicates four hours a day to learning. For someone with 30 years of experience to spend that much time just learning is incredible. (The more I’ve learnt the more I realise how I have just begun to scratch the surface of software development - it seems that this feeling never goes away!). Secondly, he tries to blog everyday for the reasons I outlined above - one blog post ended up being read by 6m+ people and got him invited to speak at a TEDx conference. So having welcomed in the New Year a couple of days ago, my resolution for this coming year is to set aside a little time everyday for both learning and reflecting on that process through blogging. And to build some exciting projects to blog about.

Hannah